Green: Faith in God questioned when doubts overwhelm

It was several years ago, and a member of my church had requested a private visit. Not at my office, but at a quiet coffee shop where our chat — particularly if another parishioner happened by — might only be construed as taking a friendly break. Nothing serious, nothing amiss. Just coffee.

But it was much more than coffee. Hesitatingly at first, she unpacked the contents of her personal crisis.

Her words were a familiar echo, often spoken during or after episodes of significant change. She recently had experienced the death of her mother, a child leaving for college and the discovery her husband had gambled away their retirement. The weight of her emotional luggage far exceeded the limit for a typical journey.

We all go through rough patches, and any one of her troubles could have stumped the sturdiest soul.

She said, “I know you’re thinking it’s because of what I’ve been through lately. But all this crazy stuff has actually only opened the door to things I’ve been asking myself for a long time. The difference is, I now feel like I have permission — and maybe the right — to ask them out loud.”

The faith she’d grown up with had assured her of a good and steady life, one in which she could always, as the old hymn goes, “lean on the everlasting arms ... safe and secure from all alarms.” She now was wondering why all the safety and security had taken an extended vacation. And that led to larger questions.

A life she’d carefully constructed and a faith she’d relied upon had come to feel more like a hand of cards she could no longer play with. If she had prayed as long and as hard as she knew how, and to little apparent effect, then what use was prayer? Did God not care for her predicament? If this were a test, she said, she’d just as soon skip class. If she couldn’t count on all she’d previously leaned upon, then what else might there be that could be called into doubt?

Our conversation lasted over several trips to the coffee shop, and the one thing I refused to provide were easy answers. Her questions, her doubts, were not of the sort that one could simply phone a friend for a quick game show-style solution.

Sometimes we risk reducing the Bible to the status of a handy answer guide to all of life’s conundrums. But doing so ignores the parade of questioning and doubting voices calling out to us from the pages of scripture.

Sarah laughs at the prospect of bearing a child in her old age. Thomas demands physical evidence of the Resurrection. The Psalms fairly burst with anguished cries of abandonment and injustice, asking “why,” “how long” and, in effect, “If you care for me, are you really there at all?”

These questions from the lips of those deemed faithful continue to be voiced — or at least, seriously pondered — by anyone who’s stepped out of the house long enough to encounter the real world.

The idea that folks who question and doubt are somehow less than faithful not only denies the reality of biblical witnesses, it places those who are brave enough to voice their doubts into an unfair and dishonest posture.

Seriously, who among us has not asked the same essential questions, never pondered why the good are not always rewarded while the wicked prosper, never noticed the absence of justice, never heard the cries of the helpless and oppressed? And in the midst of that, who has never wondered what the heck a righteous and faithful God was up to?

Who among us during a church service has never nodded our heads in affirmation and spoken amens along with the crowd, only to walk silently and alone to our car and ask, “But is it all really true?”

What my friend and member needed over coffee was simply the safe space and time to ask that question, without fear of reprisal or condemnation for asking. Her earnest desire was to reconcile her long-held beliefs with a faith that might make more sense, in her growing awareness that the black-and-white answers she’d depended on for so long no longer worked quite as well in a life of gray areas.

She needed permission to grow, to explore, to seek understanding without the fear that doing so would brand her as unfaithful.

“Close enough,” I said, and asked her to imagine her journey of discovery as a dance, where her faith and doubt were not antagonists but partners gliding across the floor.

Enjoying the give-and-take, yet moving together as one. Dancing freely as if no one else were watching, dancing to a life melody with major and minor chords, dancing with the creative tension of pesky wondering grasping hands tightly with blessed assurance.

And mostly, having God’s permission to take to the floor in the first place.

David Green is minister of Amarillo Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. His website is davidgreenfaith.com.

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I was raised in a church that provided warm nurturing role models and positive moral guidance.
The church also discouraged, if not forbid, any questioning of our rigidly held belief system. To an intellectually curious adolescent the church seemed rejecting and afraid of spiritual exploration.

As a young adult I became a Unitarian Universalist where examining your belief system and questioning and exploring religious truth is encouraged.

I can not call myself Christian. I read David Green's column almost every Saturday and his words leave me comforted, I know I am ok in that I don't have to swallow the Protestant Evangelical way of thinking and David Green reinforces that for me.

I think it's sad that woman had to meet you in a coffee shop so she didn't have to defend herself to her friends and family for questioning.

I can not call myself Christian. I read David Green's column almost every Saturday and his words leave me comforted, I know I am ok in that I don't have to swallow the Protestant Evangelical way of thinking and David Green reinforces that for me.

I think it's sad that woman had to meet you in a coffee shop so she didn't have to defend herself to her friends and family for questioning.

Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear. Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787